It Can't Happen Here Read online

  “My name is Jessup, Commander. Doremus is my first name.”

  “Ah, I see. It could be. Quite so. Very New England. Doremus.” Swan was leaning back in his wooden armchair, powerful trim hands behind his neck. “I’ll tell you, my dear fellow. One’s memory is so wretched, you know. I’ll just call you ‘Doremus,’ sans Mister. Then, d’ you see, it might apply to either the first (or Christian, as I believe one’s wretched people in Back Bay insist on calling it)—either the Christian or the surname. Then we shall feel all friendly and secure. Now, Doremus, my dear fellow, I begged my friends in the M.M.—I do trust they were not too importunate, as these parochial units sometimes do seem to be—but I ordered them to invite you here, really, just to get your advice as a journalist. Does it seem to you that most of the peasants here are coming to their senses and ready to accept the Corpo fait accompli?”

  Doremus grumbled, “But I understood I was dragged here—and if you want to know, your squad was all of what you call ‘importunate’!—because of an editorial I wrote about President Windrip.”

  “Oh, was that you, Doremus? You see?—I was right—one does have such a wretched memory! I do seem now to remember some minor incident of the sort—you know—mentioned in the agenda. Do have another cigarette, my dear fellow.”

  “Swan! I don’t care much for this cat-and-mouse game—at least, not while I’m the mouse. What are your charges against me?”

  “Charges? Oh, my only aunt! Just trifling things—criminal libel and conveying secret information to alien forces and high treason and homicidal incitement to violence—you know, the usual boresome line. And all so easily got rid of, my Doremus, if you’d just be persuaded—you see how quite pitifully eager I am to be friendly with you, and to have the inestimable aid of your experience here—if you’d just decide that it might be the part of discretion—so suitable, y’ know, to your venerable years——”

  “Damn it, I’m not venerable, nor anything like it. Only sixty. Sixty-one, I should say.”

  “Matter of ratio, my dear fellow. I’m forty-seven m’self, and I have no doubt the young pups already call me venerable! But as I was saying, Doremus——”

  (Why was it he winced with fury every time Swan called him that?)

  “—with your position as one of the Council of Elders, and with your responsibilities to your family—it would be too sick-making if anything happened to them, y’ know!—you just can’t afford to be too brash! And all we desire is for you to play along with us in your paper—I would adore the chance of explaining some of the Corpos’ and the Chief’s still unrevealed plans to you. You’d see such a new light!”

  Shad grunted, “Him? Jessup couldn’t see a new light if it was on the end of his nose!”

  “A moment, my dear Captain. . .. And also, Doremus, of course we shall urge you to help us by giving us a complete list of every person in this vicinity that you know of who is secretly opposed to the Administration.”

  “Spying? Me?”

  “Quite!”

  “If I’m accused of—— I insist on having my lawyer, Mungo Kitterick, and on being tried, not all this bear-baiting——”

  “Quaint name. Mungo Kitterick! Oh, my only aunt! Why does it give me so absurd a picture of an explorer with a Greek grammar in his hand? You don’t quite understand, my Doremus. Habeas corpus—due processes of law—too, too bad!—all those ancient sanctities, dating, no doubt, from Magna Charta, been suspended—oh, but just temporarily, y’ know—state of crisis—unfortunate necessity martial law——”

  “Damn it, Swan——”

  “Commander, my dear fellow—ridiculous matter of military discipline, y’ know—such rot!”

  “You know mighty well and good it isn’t temporary! It’s permanent—that is, as long as the Corpos last.”

  “It could be!”

  “Swan—Commander—you get that ‘it could be’ and ‘my aunt’ from the Reggie Fortune stories, don’t you?”

  “Now there is a fellow detective-story fanatic! But how too bogus!”

  “And that’s Evelyn Waugh! You’re quite a literary man for so famous a yachtsman and horseman, Commander.”

  “Horsemun, yachtsmun, lit-er-ary man! Am I, Doremus, even in my sanctum sanctorum, having, as the lesser breeds would say, the pants kidded off me? Oh, my Doremus, that couldn’t be! And just when one is so feeble, after having been so, shall I say excoriated, by your so amiable friend, Mrs. Lorinda Pike? No, no! How too unbefitting the majesty of the law!”

  Shad interrupted again, “Yeh, we had a swell time with your girl-friend, Jessup. But I already had the dope about you and her before.”

  Doremus sprang up, his chair crashing backward on the floor. He was reaching for Shad’s throat across the table. Effingham Swan was on him, pushing him back into another chair. Doremus hiccuped with fury. Shad had not even troubled to rise, and he was going on contemptuously:

  “Yuh, you two have quite some trouble if you try to pull any spy stuff on the Corpos. My, my, Doremus, ain’t we had fun, Lindy and you, playing footie-footie these last couple years! Didn’t nobody know about it, did they! But what you didn’t know was Lindy—and don’t it beat hell a long-nosed, skinny old maid like her can have so much pep!—and she’s been cheating on you right along, sleeping with every doggone man boarder she’s had at the Tavern, and of course with her little squirt of a partner, Nipper!”

  Swan’s great hand—hand of an ape with a manicure—held Doremus in his chair. Shad snickered. Emil Staubmeyer, who had been sitting with fingertips together, laughed amiably. Swan patted Doremus’s back.

  He was less sunken by the insult to Lorinda than by the feeling of helpless loneliness. It was so late; the night so quiet. He would have been glad if even the M.M. guards had come in from the hall. Their rustic innocence, however barnyardishly brutal, would have been comforting after the easy viciousness of the three judges.

  Swan was placidly resuming: “But I suppose we really must get down to business—however agreeable, my dear clever literary detective, it would be to discuss Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers and Norman Klein. Perhaps we can some day, when the Chief puts us both in the same prison! There’s really, my dear Doremus, no need of your troubling your legal gentleman, Mr. Monkey Kitteridge. I am quite authorized to conduct this trial—for quaintly enough, Doremus, it is a trial, despite the delightful St. Botolph’s atmosphere! And as to testimony, I already have all I need, both in the good Miss Lorinda’s inadvertent admissions, in the actual text of your editorial criticizing the Chief, and in the quite thorough reports of Captain Ledue and Dr. Staubmeyer. One really ought to take you out and shoot you—and one is quite empowered to do so, oh quite!—but one has one’s faults—one is really too merciful. And perhaps we can find a better use for you than as fertilizer—you are, you know, rather too much on the skinny side to make adequate fertilizer.

  “You are to be released on parole, to assist and coach Dr. Staubmeyer who, by orders from Commissioner Reek, at Hanover, has just been made editor of the Informer, but who doubtless lacks certain points of technical training. You will help him—oh, gladly, I am sure!—until he learns. Then we’ll see what we’ll do with you!. . .You will write editorials, with all your accustomed brilliance—oh, I assure you, people constantly stop on Boston Common to discuss your masterpieces; have done for years! But you’ll write only as Dr. Staubmeyer tells you. Understand? Oh. Today—since ‘tis already past the witching hour—you will write an abject apology for your diatribe—oh yes, very much on the abject side! You know—you veteran journalists do these things so neatly—just admit you were a cockeyed liar and that sort of thing—bright and bantering—you know! And next Monday you will, like most of the other ditchwater-dull papers, begin the serial publication of the Chief’s Zero Hour. You’ll enjoy that!”

  Clatter and shouts at the door. Protests from the unseen guards. Dr. Fowler Greenhill pounding in, stopping with arms akimbo, shouting as he strode down to the table, “What do you three co
mic judges think you’re doing?”

  “And who may our impetuous friend be? He annoys me, rather,” Swan asked of Shad.

  “Doc Fowler—Jessup’s son-in-law. And a bad actor. Why, couple days ago I offered him charge of medical inspection for all the M.M.’s in the county, and he said—this red-headed smart aleck here!—he said you and me and Commissioner Reek and Doc Staubmeyer and all of us were a bunch of hoboes that’d be digging ditches in a labor camp if we hadn’t stole some officers’ uniforms!”

  “Ah, did he indeed?” purred Swan.

  Fowler protested: “He’s a liar. I never mentioned you. I don’t even know who you are.”

  “My name, good sir, is Commander Effingham Swan, M.J.!”

  “Well, M. J., that still doesn’t enlighten me. Never heard of you!”

  Shad interrupted, “How the hell did you get past the guards, Fowler?” (He who had never dared call that long-reaching, swift-moving redhead anything more familiar than “Doc.”)

  “Oh, all your Minnie Mouses know me. I’ve treated most of your brightest gunmen for unmentionable diseases. I just told them at the door that I was wanted in here professionally.”

  Swan was at his silkiest: “Oh, and how we did want you, my dear fellow—though we didn’t know it until this moment. So you are one of these brave rustic sculapiuses?”

  “I am! And if you were in the war—which I should doubt, from your pansy way of talking—you may be interested to know that I am also a member of the American Legion—quit Harvard and joined up in 1918 and went back afterwards to finish. And I want to warn you three half-baked Hitlers——”

  “Ah! But my dear friend! A mil-i-tary man! How too too! Then we shall have to treat you as a responsible person—responsible for your idiocies—not just as the uncouth clodhopper that you appear!”

  Fowler was leaning both fists on the table. “Now I’ve had enough! I’m going to push in your booful face——”

  Shad had his fists up, was rounding the table, but Swan snapped, “No! Let him finish! He may enjoy digging his own grave. You know—people do have such quaint variant notions about sports. Some laddies actually like to go fishing—all those slimy scales and the shocking odor! By the way, Doctor, before it’s too late, I would like to leave with you the thought for the day that I was also in the war to end wars—a major. But go on. I do so want to listen to you yet a little.”

  “Cut the cackle, will you, M. J.? I’ve just come here to tell you that I’ve had enough—everybody’s had enough—of your kidnaping Mr. Jessup—the most honest and useful man in the whole Beulah Valley! Typical low-down sneaking kidnapers! If you think your phony Rhodes-Scholar accent keeps you from being just another cowardly, murdering Public Enemy, in your toy-soldier uniform——”

  * * *

  Swan held up his hand in his most genteel Back Bay manner. “A moment, Doctor, if you will be so good?” And to Shad: “I should think we’d heard enough from the Comrade, wouldn’t you, Commissioner? Just take the bastard out and shoot him.”

  “O. K.! Swell!” Shad chuckled; and, to the guards at the half-open door, “Get the corporal of the guard and a squad—six men—loaded rifles—make it snappy, see?”

  The guards were not far down the corridor, and their rifles were already loaded. It was in less than a minute that Aras Dilley was saluting from the door, and Shad was shouting, “Come here! Grab this dirty crook!” He pointed at Fowler. “Take him along outside.”

  They did, for all of Fowler’s struggling. Aras Dilley jabbed Fowler’s right wrist with a bayonet. It spilled blood down on his hand, so scrubbed for surgery, and like blood his red hair tumbled over his forehead.

  Shad marched out with them, pulling his automatic pistol from its holster and looking at it happily.

  Doremus was held, his mouth was clapped shut, by two guards as he tried to reach Fowler. Emil Staubmeyer seemed a little scared, but Effingham Swan, suave and amused, leaned his elbows on the table and tapped his teeth with a pencil.

  From the courtyard, the sound of a rifle volley, a terrifying wail, one single emphatic shot, and nothing after.

  20

  The real trouble with the Jews is that they are cruel. Anybody with a knowledge of history knows how they tortured poor debtors in secret catacombs, all through the Middle Ages. Whereas the Nordic is distinguished by his gentleness and his kind-heartedness to friends, children, dogs, and people of inferior races.

  Zero Hour, Berzelius Windrip.

  * * *

  THE REVIEW in Dewey Haik’s provincial court of Judge Swan’s sentence on Greenhill was influenced by County Commissioner Ledue’s testimony that after the execution he found in Greenhill’s house a cache of the most seditious documents: copies of Trowbridge’s Lance for Democracy, books by Marx and Trotzky, Communistic pamphlets urging citizens to assassinate the Chief.

  Mary, Mrs. Greenhill, insisted that her husband had never read such things; that, if anything, he had been too indifferent to politics. Naturally, her word could not be taken against that of Commissioner Ledue, Assistant Commissioner Staubmeyer (known everywhere as a scholar and man of probity), and Military Judge Effingham Swan. It was necessary to punish Mrs. Greenhill—or, rather, to give a strong warning to other Mrs. Greenhills—by seizing all the property and money Greenhill had left her.

  Anyway, Mary did not fight very vigorously. Perhaps she realized her guilt. In two days she turned from the crispest, smartest, most swift-spoken woman in Fort Beulah into a silent hag, dragging about in shabby and unkempt black. Her son and she went to live with her father, Doremus Jessup.

  Some said that Jessup should have fought for her and her property. But he was not legally permitted to do so. He was on parole, subject, at the will of the properly constituted authorities, to a penitentiary sentence.

  * * *

  So Mary returned to the house and the overfurnished bedroom she had left as a bride. She could not, she said, endure its memories. She took the attic room that had never been quite “finished off.” She sat up there all day, all evening, and her parents never heard a sound. But within a week her David was playing about the yard most joyfully. . .playing that he was an M.M. officer.

  The whole house seemed dead, and all that were in it seemed frightened, nervous, forever waiting for something unknown—all save David and, perhaps, Mrs. Candy, bustling in her kitchen.

  Meals had been notoriously cheerful at the Jessups’; Doremus chattered to an audience of Mrs. Candy and Sissy, flustering Emma with the most outrageous assertions—that he was planning to go to Greenland; that President Windrip had taken to riding down Pennsylvania Avenue on an elephant; and Mrs. Candy was as unscrupulous as all good cooks in trying to render them speechlessly drowsy after dinner and to encourage the stealthy expansion of Doremus’s already rotund little belly, with her mince pie, her apple pie with enough shortening to make the eyes pop out in sweet anguish, the fat corn fritters and candied potatoes with the broiled chicken, the clam chowder made with cream.

  Now, there was little talk among the adults at table and, though Mary was not showily “brave,” but colorless as a glass of water, they were nervously watching her. Everything they spoke of seemed to point toward the murder and the Corpos; if you said, “It’s quite a warm fall,” you felt that the table was thinking, “So the M.M.’s can go on marching for a long time yet before snow flies,” and then you choked and asked sharply for the gravy. Always Mary was there, a stone statue chilling the warm and commonplace people packed in beside her.

  So it came about that David dominated the table talk, for the first delightful time in his nine years of experiment with life, and David liked that very much indeed, and his grandfather liked it not nearly so well.

  He chattered, like an entire palmful of monkeys, about Foolish, about his new playmates (children of Medary Cole, the miller), about the apparent fact that crocodiles are rarely found in the Beulah River, and the more moving fact that the Rotenstern young had driven with their father clear to Albany.<
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  Now Doremus was fond of children; approved of them; felt with an earnestness uncommon to parents and grandparents that they were human beings and as likely as the next one to become editors. But he hadn’t enough sap of the Christmas holly in his veins to enjoy listening without cessation to the bright prattle of children. Few males have, outside of Louisa May Alcott. He thought (though he wasn’t very dogmatic about it) that the talk of a Washington correspondent about politics was likely to be more interesting than Davy’s remarks on cornflakes and garter snakes, so he went on loving the boy and wishing he would shut up. And escaped as soon as possible from Mary’s gloom and Emma’s suffocating thoughtfulness, wherein you felt, every time Emma begged, “Oh, you must take just a little more of the nice chestnut dressing, Mary dearie,” that you really ought to burst into tears.

  Doremus suspected that Emma was, essentially, more appalled by his having gone to jail than by the murder of her son-in-law. Jessups simply didn’t go to jail. People who went to jail were bad, just as barn-burners and men accused of that fascinatingly obscure amusement, a “statutory offense,” were bad; and as for bad people, you might try to be forgiving and tender, but you didn’t sit down to meals with them. It was all so irregular, and most upsetting to the household routine!

  So Emma loved him and worried about him till he wanted to go fishing and actually did go so far as to get out his flies.

  But Lorinda had said to him, with eyes brilliant and unworried, “And I thought you were just a cud-chewing Liberal that didn’t mind being milked! I am so proud of you! You’ve encouraged me to fight against—— Listen, the minute I heard about your imprisonment I chased Nipper out of my kitchen with a bread knife!. . .Well, anyway, I thought about doing it!”

  * * *

  The office was deader than his home. The worst of it was that it wasn’t so very bad—that, he saw, he could slip into serving the Corpo state with, eventually, no more sense of shame than was felt by old colleagues of his who in pre-Corpo days had written advertisements for fraudulent mouth washes or tasteless cigarettes, or written for supposedly reputable magazines mechanical stories about young love. In a waking nightmare after his imprisonment, Doremus had pictured Staubmeyer and Ledue in the Informer office standing over him with whips, demanding that he turn out sickening praise for the Corpos, yelling at him until he rose and killed and was killed. Actually, Shad stayed away from the office, and Doremus’s master, Staubmeyer, was ever so friendly and modest and rather nauseatingly full of praise for his craftsmanship. Staubmeyer seemed satisfied when, instead of the “apology” demanded by Swan, Doremus stated that “Henceforth this paper will cease all criticisms of the present government.”